Architecture solution for client-server communication protocol

Question

This question is pretty general, but it's really hard for me to find a good answer or an example of how this should be done.

We are writing a simple multi-user application for collaboration with a web browser, and we have some problems deciding what to use for the communication protocol. We are developing in C # under Mono, hoping to eventually make it cross-platform.

The message will probably consist of such messages as: user registration in the session (client to server), notification of clients of the new user connected (server to clients), request to load the page (from client to server), etc. The ideas we have so far are:

• XmlSerialization of extensions to the base class of messages

which we tried but are having difficulty using the XmlSerialization mechanism as a means of transmitting data over time, so we have doubts that this is the right way to do this.

• Binary serialization in the same case

which I don’t really like because of the form the data takes, and because I'm afraid it is a little more risky.

• Google Protocol Buffers

• FOS

both of them sound much closer to what should be used, but we are afraid that this will be unnecessary for such a fairly simple protocol.

and maybe others that I missed.

What would be a good clean way to do this?

Answer 1

WCF - gives you a platform.

THEN uses JSON and REST for the actual API (parameters that you can use in WCF). That way, you can basically work in javascript basically.

WCF is a great tool for the wise (unfortunately, most of them may be too many for most of them - not sure), including creating javascript proxies on the fly for your server-side interfaces.